INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

WASHINGTON

We’ve had an Italian minister suggesting Alan Greenspan was almost as bad as Osama bin Laden. We’ve had the Russian president musing that the days of American domination are gone for good. We’ve had the Argentine president mocking the first world that has popped like a bubble.
The only growth industry in the United States these days is the international one predicting the country’s imminent demise. But all this gloating over the Wall Street debacle is a little too facile.
Everyone rode the cheap-credit, real-estate boom of recent years to some degree. London was in its vanguard, becoming a city too expensive for its own middle class. Mortgage-backed securities were gobbled up by banks from Munich to Reykjavik. While global markets boomed, I didn’t hear too many finance ministers denouncing American capitalism as a giant Ponzi scheme.
As Woody Allen observed, “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” While there was plenty of it about, few complained. Now that it’s scarce, America-bashing is the global blood sport.
At the same time, however, investors are piling into a now rising dollar as a last safe haven. I’m reminded of the many European attacks on the United States I’ve heard that end with a plaintive: Oh, by the way, how do I get my daughter into Stanford or Yale- The world’s view of America is schizophrenic.
It’s the country everyone loves to hate, the bellicose giant, home of savage capitalism. How gratifying it is to many countries to recall America’s lectures on the merits of the market and warnings against state intervention in the light of the massive rescue of an unregulated system by the United States Treasury!
Yet America is also the nation to which everyone turns for answers, seldom proposing initiatives without it, held still in its thrall. Tell me your America and I’ll tell you who you are: of no other country can that be said.
I’m not arguing against the gravity of the United States crisis. The Bush administration will leave a weakened America. But it’s dangerous to underestimate America’s capacity to rebound. And the crisis has confirmed that while wealth and power have shifted from America, global responsibility has not.
Of all the recent comments about the United States, I found one from Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, among the most smug. “Europe is still the center of the literary world,” he opined, adding that the United States “is too isolated, too insular.”
Engdahl is wrong, as all those parents around the world trying to get their kids into United States colleges suggest. He should read Philip Roth’s new novel, “Indignation,” a searing journey into an America divided and at war in another moment in its history (and Roth’s “American Pastoral” deserved the Nobel Prize in its own right). It’s European insularity that’s apparent in his views.
My impression is that, Sarah Palin notwithstanding, many Americans have arrived at a moment of serious reflection about their country’s plight and place in the world. Roth’s extraordinary work this last decade is one such examination. Other countries should shun easy gloating and repay some of their debt to America by asking what constructive role they can play in a new, more stable global financial order.